Walter J. Travis (January 10, 1862 – July 31, 1927) was an American amateur golfer during the early 1900s. He was also a noted golf journalist and publisher, an innovator in all aspects of golf, a teacher, and golf course architect.Sources: (GOLF, 1901; The Golfer Magazine, p. 182, July 1902; Rice, Grantland, 1924; Rice, Grantland, 1927; Wind, 1948; Cornish & Whitten, 1993; Scarth & Crafter, 2004)
Golfing career Travis was born in Maldon, Australia. He arrived in New York City in 1886 as a 23-year-old representative of the Australian-based McLean Brothers and Rigg exporters of hardware and construction products. Travis married Anne Bent of Middleton, Connecticut, on January 9, 1890, and later that year he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Shortly after their wedding, Travis and his wife moved into their new home in Flushing, New York, where they would live until their move to Garden City, on Long Island, in 1900.
In 1896, while traveling in England, Travis learned that his Niantic Club friends of Flushing, New York, were intent on creating a new golf club. He was scornful of the idea but, wishing to keep up with his friends, he purchased a set of golf clubs to take with him on his return to the United States. As he said, "I first knelt at the shrine of the Goddess of Golf" in October 1896 on the Oakland links, just three months before his 35th birthday. Within a month of hitting his first golf shot, Travis earned his first trophy by winning the Oakland Golf Club handicap competition. Travis became, in his words, "an infatuated devotee" of the game. He dedicated himself to the study of instructional books written by Horace Hutchinson, Willie Park Jr., and others. He practiced relentlessly. Within a year, Travis won the Oakland Golf Club championship with a score of 82.
In 1898, Travis entered his first U.S. Amateur and lost to Findlay S. Douglas in the semifinal match. By this time, he had caught the attention and respect of fellow competitors and, because of his late start in the game, Travis was respectfully referred to as "The Old Man" or "The Grand Old Man". Driven by his intense and compulsive dedication to the game, Travis was soon the country's top amateur golfer, winning the U.S. Amateur in 1900, 1901, and 1903. In 1904, he became the first player from America to win the British Amateur, a feat that would not be duplicated for another 22 years even with "wholesale assaults and single attempts to duplicate" his feat by great amateur golfers such as Jerome Travers, Francis Ouimet, and Bobby Jones. The news of Travis's British victory sparked a surge of interest in the game of golf throughout the United States.
In 1904, champion British golfer Harold Hilton described Travis: "In style, the American champion is essentially what may be termed a made golfer, for his is a style which by the wildest stretch of imagination could not be called ornate. Still, it boasts useful attributes; it is business-like and determined, and is one in which no energy is wasted. Like all golfers who really scored a success at the game, he keeps the right elbow well in to the right side, holding the hands very low, like Messrs. Hutchings, Fry and G. F. Smith—three of the best examples of golfers who have risen to eminence while lacking the advantage of playing the game in their youth. The swing of the club is not long—in fact, it might be termed a three-quarter swing—but it is sufficient to get a free action with the wrist, and although Mr. Travis does not obtain an abnormal carry, he nevertheless gets a long roll on the ball, and against the wind in particular he is beyond the average as a driver, especially as he appears to have mastered the art of the scientific hooking."
Among his other major victories as an amateur golfer were the following: Three North and South Amateurs at Pinehurst, and four Metropolitan Golf Association Championships. When Travis won his fourth MGA Championship, in 1915, at the age of 53, he beat 28-year-old Jerome Travers in the final match. Just the year before, Travers had eliminated Travis in the semifinals of the U.S. Amateur. With declining health diminishing his skills, Travis announced his retirement from competitive golf in 1916.
Overall, "Travis competed in 17 consecutive U.S. Amateurs from 1898 to 1914, compiling a 45-14 record, earning medalist honors three consecutive years (1900-02), and losing to the eventual champion on five occasions. He competed in six U.S. Opens between 1902 and 1912 and was low amateur five times and tied for third low amateur the other." Travis placed second in the 1902 U.S. Open Championship.
In the January 28, 1922 issue of The American Golfer, the following response was given to a query about "How many tournaments Mr. Travis has won, counting in every variety?":
"Our opinion is that Mr. Travis has won more low gross, low net and open tourneys than any other living golfer. He was practically unbeatable for a stretch of six years from 1898 to 1904 during which time he played in double or triple the number of events entered by either John Ball or Chick Evans. A guess at the number of his trophies would place it over five hundred and perhaps nearer to a thousand. In 1901, Travis was national champion and in 1915 he was again the Metropolitan champion. His southern victories were numerous."
In a 1927 Golf Illustrated article, titled "The Figures Prove It", author John Kofoed offered the following match-play records of noted amateur players in major events:
(Source):
Player Won Lost % Won*Bobby Jones 42 9 82Francis Ouimet 43 12 78Walter Travis 45 11 80Chick Evans 37 13 74Jerome Travers 33 6 85William Fownes 33 22 60Jess Sweetser 28 11 72Robert Gardner 35 15 70 "% Won" figures added to the Kofoed data.
Tournament wins This list does not include Travis's countless victories in noted club invitationals or championships, such as his 9 wins in the Garden City Golf Club's Spring Invitational that is now known as the Travis Memorial, nor his countless victories at Lakewood CC's Spring and Fall tourneys that attracted a large field of golfers from the metropolitan area. 1900 U.S. Amateur, Metropolitan Amateur 1901 U.S. Amateur 1902 Metropolitan Amateur 1903 U.S. Amateur 1904 The Amateur Championship, North and South Amateur 1906 South Florida Open 1909 Metropolitan Amateur 1910 North and South Amateur 1911 North and South Amateur 1912 North and South Amateur 1913 North and South Amateur 1913 Cuban Amateur 1913 South Florida Open Low Amateur 1914 Cuban Amateur 1914 South Florida Open Low Amateur 1914 Metropolitan Amateur 1915 Southern Florida Low Amateur 1916 Southern Florida Low Amateur
Major championships
Amateur wins (4) YearChampionshipWinning scoreRunner-up 1900 U.S. Amateur 2 up Findlay S. Douglas 1901 U.S. Amateur 5 & 4 Walter Egan 1903 U.S. Amateur 5 & 4 Eben Byers 1904 British Amateur 4 & 3 Edward Blackwell
Results timeline Travis did not play in the Masters Tournament (not founded until 1934) or the PGA Championship (professionals only).
Tournament18981899190019011902190319041905190619071908190919101911191219131914U.S. OpenWDT2 LAT15T11 LAT23 LAT7 LAT10 LAThe Open ChampionshipCUTU.S. AmateurSFSF1 M1 MR16 M1R16QFSF MQF MSF MQFR16R32R16QFSFThe Amateur Championship1
M = Medalist LA = Low amateur WD = Withdrew "T" indicates a tie for a place R32, R16, QF, SF = Round in which player lost in match play
Sources: U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur, 1904 Open Championship,www.opengolf.com 1904 Amateur ChampionshipGolf, July, 1904, pgs. 5-10.
Contributions to golf
Travis was a prolific writer who wrote extensively on a variety of golf topics, and was published in the leading sports magazines of the time. His first book, Practical Golf, published in 1901, received rave reviews from The New York Times (6/14/1901) for its depth, thoroughness, and clarity as a reference book. Practical Golf dealt with a variety of topics, including golfing techniques, golf equipment, construction of golf courses, the design and placement of hazards, rules of golf, and conduct of golf competitions. His chapter on "Handicapping" was first published in the July 1901 issue of Golf, and described as "the authoritative treatise on handicapping" of its era. A second book, The Art of Putting, was released in 1904.
In 1908, Travis founded and published The American Golfer magazine. The American Golfer was widely regarded as the most influential golf magazine of its time. Travis, and other authors, used it as an effective voice for their views. Travis stayed at the helm of "The American Golfer" as editor until he turned it over to Grantland Rice in the spring of 1920, and severed his connection with the magazine by the end of 1920.
Travis was not hesitant about trying new equipment in his efforts to improve his game. He was the first to win a major event using the Haskell rubber-cored golf ball—the 1901 U.S. Amateur. As reported in the Travis biography, The Old Man, Travis had "dabbled with predecessors of the Haskell ball, but kept his involvement under wraps until shortly before the tournament" and he "had developed a feel for this type of ball with practice and was not afraid to debut it at the championship". As Labbance reports, "Travis's bold move had not only prompted a change in golf balls but a change in golf as well". It sounded the death knell for the gutta-percha ball, created the need for inserts in the face of wooden clubs to prevent splitting, and soon led to calls for the lengthening of golf courses due to the longer shots made possible by the Haskell.
Travis was innovative in his approach to golf course design. In a Practical Golf chapter on hazards, Travis was critical of the ubiquitous and, to him, unappealing cross-bunkers that stretched all the way across the fairway at predictable intervals. Rather, he argued for more strategically and visually appealing bunkers placed along the edges of fairways, stating, "Hazards arranged somewhat upon the lines indicated, rather than slavishly following the system adopted on the great majority of our courses, would, I think, make the game vastly more interesting, and more provocative of better golf all around."
Many other innovative steps were taken by Travis throughout his career. His use of the Schenectady center-shafted putter in his British Amateur victory attracted considerable comment and controversy. Some six years later, the Royal and Ancient would issue a ban on all mallet-headed putters, including the Schenectady. Travis conducted careful experiments with varying lengths of driver shafts, often using a driver with a shaft as long as 50 inches in his search for greater distance off the tee. At his home course, Garden City Golf Club, Travis installed smaller sized cups on the practice green to help hone the accuracy of his putting.
Though he was innovative with his equipment, and practiced incessantly, Travis disdained the notion of physical training after his first trial of abstaining from smoking and drinking during an 1897 tournament. He reported that he "putted like a baby", and would never again depart from his usual habits.
Throughout his career as a journalist, Travis produced numerous comprehensive and detailed golf instructional essays. Given the reputation he earned as an outstanding putter, it was natural that many of his articles dealt with his well-proven principles of putting. In one of his earliest articles, Travis wrote "The sum of it all is, that my experience shows conclusively that the really good putter is largely born, not made, and is inherently endowed with a good eye and a tactile delicacy of grip which are denied the ordinary run of mortals. At the same time, less favored players may, by the adoption of methods which stood the test of actual experience, materially improve their game." His effectiveness as an instructor was demonstrated in the following example: